The Victorian roller craze

The BBC has quite a charming magazine article about Victorian England and its (short lived) craze for roller skating.   It let the young men and ladies mingle in quite a novel fashion, apparently:

By the mid-1870s, a craze for indoor rollerskating had come to Britain, with 50 rinks in place in London at one point. The press dubbed the phenomenon "rinkomania", but the healthy exercise that Plimpton had boasted of was not all that attracted the young "rinkers".

"The skating rink is the neutral ground on which the sexes may meet," reported Australia's Port Macquarie News of goings-on in London and elsewhere, "without all the pomp and circumstances of society. The rink knows no Mother Grundy, with her eagle eye and sharp tongue, for Mother Grundy dare not trust herself on skates, and so the rinker is happier than the horseman of whom Horace sang."

Holding hands and whispering sweet nothings became easier without Mother Grundy - a contemporary term for a stern matriarch - and her ilk tagging along. Prolonged eye contact with one's intended replaced stolen glances...

But rollerskating became less popular by the 1890s, with many rinks, built in a hurry at the height of the craze, going out of business. 

There's probably a cable TV series to be made out of that, somehow.  Especially if there was ever arson and crime involved.

Update: just googling around, it seems that the Suffragette movement used to meet at some roller skating venues, and famously (well, except for me) stayed out all night at one in 1911 to avoid the census.   All good fodder for a TV series...